Embodiments of the present invention are directed generally to methods for optimizing business processes, complying with governmental regulations, and identifying threat and vulnerability risks for an enterprise.
Businesses today face many external pressures. One set of pressures is economic, such as meeting shareholder demands to leverage existing investments to improve performance, thereby increasing the shareholders' investment. Another set of pressures includes compliance with governmental regulations. Over the last several years, a tremendous amount of new laws and regulations have been promulgated, which have created costly and complex compliance requirements for businesses. These new compliance requirements include the U.S. Patriot Act, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), privacy laws and regulations, and others. Another set of pressures concerns security. Businesses today face both internal and external security concerns, ranging from employee theft of company trade secrets, to denial of service attacks on company web sites, to catastrophic terrorist attacks. A business's ability to address these technological concerns is often exacerbated by the fact that many businesses today use disparate, unconnected information systems.
One known technique for assessing the information security risks of an organization is the OCTAVE® (Operationally Critical Threat, Asset, and Vulnerability EvaluationSM) risk-based strategic assessment and planning technique for security. OCTAVE defines the essential components of a comprehensive, systematic, context-driven information security risk evaluation. By following the OCTAVE risk assessment technique, an organization can make information-protection decisions based on risks to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of critical information technology assets.